Author: Liquorice
Date: 2020-03-15 19:38
"How best to learn this piece" is a very interesting question and there is no simple answer. Jazz players have been learning by listening and copying pretty much since the beginning. In most styles of jazz music, the performer is to a greater or lesser extent the composer of the music as well. Even if they didn't compose the tunes themselves, they are still making up their very personalised improvisations and "re-interpretations" of the original written-down material. This original written-down material is also usually only an incomplete sketch of the final played version and a creative "completion" of the composition by the performer is expected by the composer.
To a much lesser extent, this is also true in Mozart: he would have expected a range of articulations, accentuations, shapings, ornaments, embellishments and other expressive devices to have been added by Stadler, so in that sense his notation is also deliberately "incomplete".
For this reason, I don't consider copying the above-mentioned Harold Wright version to be remotely the best way to learn this piece. Wright doesn't add nearly anything like the amount nuance which Mozart would have expected. And worse, Wright doesn't even follow some of the few specific indications that Mozart did bother to give, which were clearly important enough for to him to feel necessary to write into the score. So even if your goal is just to use an audio recording to learn the notes properly (never mind questions of interpretation) the Wright version is definitely the Wrong one :-)
Unfortunately we don't have copies of recordings of players from 1791, and Stadler didn't have a recording either when he got the piece. But Stadler understood Mozart's musical language just as well as Charlie Parker understood Bebop, so he had a big advantage over us. If all that we had left of Parker were his written scores, we would have some pretty terrible versions of Donna Lee if musicians thought that simply reproducing the notes of the score was sufficient.
What can we do? We have the "Winterthur Fragment" with a complete clarinet part (basset horn actually) of the first 199 bars. This at least gives us the notations that Mozart did write. There are many other sources from the time period that we can consult, including tutors explaining how this music should be performed, and lots has been written about 18th century performance practice in the last 50 years or so. Much of this research for late 18th century music was notably done after the Wright recording was made.
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The Clarinet BBoard
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